Tony Blair woke this morning to find himself in the enviable position of a second chance at his legacy with the announcement the clocks are going back not one hour, but a full twenty years this October.

The surprise move is the culmination of a joint, and until today secret, project which brought together the combined talents of Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox (he’s doing the music) and the Ministry of Defence.

A spokesman for the project, Don’t D Ream It’s Over, spoke only to the Herald’s Science is Possible correspondent.

“It’s not so much ground breaking and clock busting,” Prof R Dawkins said, “Stephen has had a hard time keeping quiet. Imagine being the massive brain that invented time travel? I’m largely involved just to irritate God botherers.”

It’s believed Mr Blair is surprisingly reluctant, believing that he always made the best choices during his time as prime minister, regardless of what hindsight determined.

Nonetheless he has been located, sedated, given a book of do’s and dont’s, and told he will shortly be blinking at the light of a second chance.

“He’s been informed he has to resist the lure of buddying up with a clown show pretending to be president of America this time, even if he is given a bomber jacket, and not to drive the worst aspects of the greed is good agenda forward to a gigantic financial crisis. And if he does do it he has to bloody well stick about and take the heat, rather than bugger off to get rich.”

Youth advocate groups are not pleased, given that they have just finished puberty and will now have to be born, and in time go through all that all over again. But being young is all about feeling hard done by, so that’s just bad luck.

“With so many seemingly insolvable problems facing the country we decided to go after a much simpler one, time travel,” Prof Dawkins added, “by way of getting everything fixed in one swoop.”

Asked about the probability of the experiment failing and T Bone Blair being lost in time, Prof Dawkins was sanguine,

“We’ve told him to consider that like being in limbo, which fits his religious views, so no matter what happens, things can only get better.”